From Romancing to sequel down the Nile

Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in “Romancing the Stone.” Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox.

Review by Harry Thomas

When “Romancing the Stone” came out in 1984, I didn’t see it at the theater. I’d read some good reviews, but I never saw it. However, when it came out on video, I rented it and my family and I sat down to watch it and were enthralled. It was a romance, but also an action picture. It had bad guys with guns, alligators, escapes through the jungle, and it was funny. When it came on HBO, we taped it for our own use. It was original, and became one of our favorite movies.

When the sequel came out a year later, I went to see it at the theater, hoping for more of the same. In the words of director Lewis Teague, who helmed “The Jewel of the Nile:” “The audience mood level went down when we split up Jack and Joan. It came back up when we brought them back together.” Not in my case. I was disappointed. They had taken something very original and made it pedestrian.

“Romancing the Stone” starts off with romance novelists Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) writing her latest potboiler romance novel in her apartment in New York. She may be world famous for lusty romances, but she’s a mousy blonde who prefers the company of her cat to the dating scene.

After meeting with her publisher to turn in her latest book, she arrives at home to find the place ransacked. The phone rings and it’s her sister Elaine (Mary Ellen Trainor), who has been kidnapped and her husband killed. Before he died, he sent Joan a package containing a map. She has to take the package down to Columbia and exchange it for her sister’s life.

Not speaking a word of Spanish, Joan takes the advice of a stranger (Manuel Ojeda) and gets on the wrong bus, winding up in the deep jungles of Colombia. After the bus crashes into a car on the road, she finds herself alone with the stranger, who points a gun at her and demands the map. Suddenly a new stranger appears over the hill; Jack Colton (Michael Douglas), a scavenger. He rescues Joan, and strikes a bargain to take her to a telephone for all of her American Express traveler’s checks.

Through their travels through the jungle, the stranger, now revealed to be a corrupt police commander, is chasing them. Also chasing them is Ralph (Danny DeVito), whose brother Ira (Zack Norman) is holding Elaine. Jack wants to know why she’s being chased by the police, and discovers the secret of the map; it’s a treasure map leading to a precious emerald.

The whole movie is a gem (pardon the pun), but the best bit is when Jack and Joan wind up at the house of a drug smuggler (Alfonso Arau) and are about to be executed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. When Jack asks Joan how she would write them out of this one, the smuggler recognizes Joan and warmly welcomes her, telling his men, “This is the lady who writes the books I read to you on Saturdays.”

The Blu-ray for this film and “Jewel of the Nile” do feature something that the conventional DVDs I own don’t; extras. “Romancing” has some deleted scenes, including those of Joan with a male publisher and attending a book signing. And the three featurettes have interviews with Douglas, Turner and DeVito. They talk about the fun they had on the film and the friendships they made. Douglas talked about trying to break out of the television actor mode after his success on “Streets of San Francisco;” Turner and DeVito talk about it being their real breakout roles. Unfortunately, there aren’t any interviews with director Robert Zemeckis, who went on to helm “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” the “Back to the Future” trilogy, and the Oscar-winning “Forrest Gump.”

The genius of the script was in that it took a woman who made a living writing lusty adventure novels and put her into the middle of one of them. Diane Thomas, a former waitress in L.A., managed to get Douglas to read her script and he decided to make it. In the featurette, “A Hidden Treasure: The Screenwriter,” they talk about Thomas being like “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling, who went from being a welfare mom to a rich woman because she wrote something everyone could connect with. Tragically, she died in a car accident six years later, in a Porsche that Douglas had given her that was being driven by her boyfriend.

It’s telling in the extras for “Jewel of the Nile” that Douglas says that was the first and last time he made a sequel to any film he had made. Although the trio of Douglas, Turner and DeVito were reunited, and the film had a promising premise, it just wasn’t up to the same level as “Romancing the Stone.”

After hooking up with Jack on his sailboat, Joan’s career has come to a grinding halt. She hasn’t written anything new worth a damn (in her opinion) in six months, and Jack doesn’t seem to care. When mysterious Arab ruler Omar (Spiros Focas) hires Joan to write his biography, she accepts but Jack doesn’t.

Jack goes back to the harbor to set sail alone when Ralph shows up, looking to kill him in revenge for what happened in Columbia. A wild-eyed Arabic man shows up, preventing Ralph from killing Jack and telling him that he must follow Joan and Omar in order to rescue the Jewel of the Nile. Jack doesn’t want any part of it, until his boat blows up behind him. Jack then accepts the mission.

Joan arrives at Omar’s palace and is treated like royalty. However, when walking through the town she comes upon some disgruntled townspeople who are protesting. When she attempts to take photos, her film is ripped out of the camera by Omar’s men. She protests, only to find out that Omar has hired her to write a puff piece on him, and she is now under arrest.

The extras on this disc are similar; deleted scenes, two featurettes. It does add an audio commentary by Teague. In the featurettes, Teague remarks that it’s very difficult to make a successful film sequel, especially when the first one was so popular. He’s right.

The premise; what happens to the characters in a romance novel in the days and weeks after the happy ending, was great. Unfortunately, in my opinion, the film didn’t live up to that. Turner said that she didn’t want to do the sequel at first, because she didn’t feel that it worked. Thomas didn’t write the sequel, but she did advise the new writers on the project, and Turner accepted a return to the role. I almost wish she hadn’t.

So, should you get these Blu-rays? I’d say yes, because “Romancing” is a chick flick that guys can watch comfortably without throwing a brick through that nice shiny HDTV; and “Jewel,” while disappointing overall, does have some good moments. Plus, it’s good to have the set. And the widescreen beats the hell out of the old pan and scan videotape I used to have.